About 50% of my people
were conceived by fornicating drunks.
If they didn’t start that way,
that’s how they ended up
and the other half the opposite.
And screw you if you think this is about alcohol,
as if your heart isn’t a polis of bees,
as if you too haven’t staggered through the gloxinia.
One was hospitalized
for inhaling the fibers of a fake beard
made of carpet remnants.
Another walked all night with a broken femur
because her masculinity had been insulted.
One pirouetted 50 times chasing his other sleeve.
Many lived on a sheet of ice.
Many green bugs hatched too soon,
became a brief paste.
The new moon’s facing away from you,
facing inward and pocked,
and still you can see what life is like
in outer space without an atmosphere.
Your father the tombstone salesman,
your mother the fire director.
Some glisten like hot dogs when they cry,
some like new credit cards,
envelopes proclaiming you qualify!
Confess some lowness, some theft,
who you fucked in the graveyard,
how you’re probably nothing but a fake,
they won’t rat you out,
they’ll probably forget,
concentrating on a flap of skin
pizza-scalded loose on the roof of their mouth.
One just trying not to destroy a muffin
un-skirting it. Animal macro-urge
in an angel suit. One stares all day
at the canvas and the work is throwing the brush down.
One with a dream journal besotted with tears,
one chewing a doll limb in a muddy yard.
The blood is fake but the bleeding’s real.
One still trying to call back
that infant joy in the tub.
One a black dot beside a G clef.
One with a box of pet ash.
When they open the suitcase back in the city,
the ocean’s still in their clothes.
Bubbles pricking the surface less and less,
bulbs coming up on the graves.
Somehow the tornado turns aside, the house saved.
Somehow they find each other
in the evacuation shelter,
they find each other at the dance.
Two people driving opposite directions
stopping to move a turtle off the road.